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9 posts from October 2011

Monday, 31 October 2011

For all our Subscription Customers there is a present in Subscription Center waitng for you to download it! Please note that the Volumes Dashboard for Civil 3D 2012 is now available for download. This new tool provides a very easy to use workflow for calculating, reporting and visualizing earthwork volumes and is available for all C3D and IDS-P/U subscribers. It’s an English language tool but can run on any language C3D 2012). Using the Volumes Dashboard you can:

Calculate volumes in multiple volume surfaces and in bounded areas within the volume surfaces.

Save volume information between drawing sessions. The entries you make in the Volumes Dashboard are persistent between drawing sessions.

Select multiple surfaces and bounded areas to show in the total volumes graph.

Friday, 28 October 2011

The troubleshooting is what each one of us have done one way or another at one point. Whether the troubleshooting involved fixing bike as our own Justin once described in his post The Art of Troubleshootingor you were trying to go to fix that oil leak in your car, or that pesky and annoying issue I have been having with desktop icons refreshing every few seconds on my laptop. This is my personal issue that no new driver, windows update or power management settings resolved (as suggested). I spent quite some time reading and trying different things before I turned into troubleshooting techniques we try to implement every day. That gave me the desired result and I found the offender fairly quickly.

But this is not what I am trying to write about. My goal here is to share my view on troubleshooting and make you all aware of few very good posts written a while ago that show how to troubleshoot. Recycling is your friend! Besides already mentioned the first post there is another one that basically outlines where to go when troubleshooting or which path to choose (Fork in the Road: How to Start Troubleshooting).

The troubleshooting process is pretty similar no matter what we try to troubleshoot and the direction we go and involves eliminating possible causes by process we call “logical elimination”. Ideally you would have two different logins and two different machines at your disposal in order to narrow down where the issue is. Only once we know the cause or place where the issue happens we can work on resolution. Other than that is something like shooting in the dark from very large distance hoping to get the target.

The greatest tool you may need to use is your own common sense. Logically, there are more, but the 3 main areas are those which will determine which way to go and luckily in most part they are mutually exclusive; drawing issue, user settings issue or installation issue. Our goal is to choose the right path. Although the direction may be different and others may advocate different ways, my personal preference is to bring all parties on the same page by asking questions and/or ensuring we are on the same version of product.

First thing before submitting a case or trying to being troubleshooting I would:

Make sure you have the latest version of the software. Utilize Communication Center to see if your product is up to date. There are many issues addressed in each Update and it wouldn’t be a good idea to ignore it.

Next step I would suggest would be to run repair of your product. By investing 10-15 minutes of your time while researching the issue would at least leave you where you wanted to be. Having repaired program with the latest updates. Believe me, you may save lot of time for yourself and for anybody who will be trying to help. This is where real troubleshooting should begin. Remember it may still end up with clean re-install, but it would be lot easier and quicker to arrive to that conclusion if necessary.

If your poking things around, asking your co-worker or intensive “googling” did not lead you to anything feasible, then you may consider posting your question to Autodesk’s Forum. If you haven’t been there recently, I can tell you that you are missing a great deal. This forum is staffed by some users like you, some of the smartest people out there like super-users who use Autodesk’s programs in production every day and are very quick to respond. From my experience it is a very friendly and approachable group. I can tell you that your question may be answered quicker there than if you created your Service request or called Tech Support. We are there too, by the way. The best part of this is - it’s free!

If you are Subscription customer or would like to become one, you can also submit your issue and have your question be answered in 1:1 fashion.

Last but not least; if you decided to send us your question it would certainly help us serve you better if you could include your good description, troubled files, screen shots, videos or anything you can think of that would help us understand and resolve issue quicker. This goes long way and we function by the rule that picture is worth thousand words, and videos even more.

P.S. If you are still wondering what caused the desktop icons flickering on my laptop. I found it – it was Office Communicator not liking my new laptop. Task manager helped me identify the wrongdoer. I closed that task and now my icons are as stable as they should be.

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Although this may not be a common occurance, you may find yourself with a shiney new machine and you eagerly install your current version plus 3 priors. As tempting as it may be to activate the latest and greatest 2012 version first, please hold off. Activating the newest version before activating the earlier versions could leave you with just a split second of the Civil 3D splash screen when attempting to launch the product.

However if you could not resist the temptation to activate 2012 first and now your 2011, 2010, or 2009 gives you nothing but a splash screen, there is some hope prior to completely starting over with clean installs. In order to correct this please move the following files into a new directory in the same location. For standalone installs:

C:\ProgramData\FLEXnet\adskflex_00691b00_tsf.data

C:\ProgramData\FLEXnet\adskflex_00691b00_tsf.data_backup.001

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Adlm\cascadeinfo.cas

DON'T DELETE THEM. Then relaunch the products and input the correct activation codes. It is recommended to activate the products in ascending order starting with 2009>2010>2011>2012. Hope this helps alleviate some frustration if you by chance come across this issue!

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

On Friday, I got a model which was set up in StormNET and as the model is run in SSA, got different output results for the hydraulic section, in comparison to the StormNET output report, even though the model was not changed and all the modeling parameters were same. First and foremost thing which came to my mind was the change in the EPA SWMM engine has caused the difference in the results.

Latest SSA version is using EPA SWMM version 5.0.021 in compare to the SNET using EPA SWMM version 5.0.014. However, I still had questions in my mind that what could be the other factors which contributed significantly for the different results for the links and the nodes in the two output reports. Though, SNET was not installed on my system. I took the help of Matt Anderson to compare the EPA SWMM 5.0.014 results with SSA. In the discussion came to know that apart from the change in EPA SWMM engine the culvert equation and the storage node floods (HGL above the node storage curve) contributed to the difference in the output results for SSA and SNET. I would like to share the data presented by Matt Anderson related to the corrections to the EPA SWMM engine between 5.0.014 (SNET) and 5.0.021 (SSA 2012).

Monday, 17 October 2011

WMS (Web Mapping Service) allows you to connect to server based imagery and linework that you can use as a backdrop for your existing data. In order to do so, set up a basic map. In the following examples, I’ll use all FDO data, but you can use anything.

Add the layer, then pick the Schema and Add to Map (I used the 2008 color orthos 30 cm layer from 2009 – its about 1/3 of the way down the list, and is not statewide coverage). It takes a minute, but imagine downloading and managing all of the tiles that go into the WMS!

Save, and use it again another day

The white bounding box is part of the WMS layer. You can go into the Style Editor for the WMS layer, select Transparency, then pick the white background area to make it the transparent color.

Have your own imagery that you want to make available as a WMS layer? Map Server can do that - more on that later.

Thursday, 13 October 2011

I have seen this more than handful of times but I have to admit it, long time ago. This morning I got a phone call asking what the reason for this message is. Customer was running the latest release of Civil 3D (2012) and when tried to open one drawing got a message saying:

"This drawing was created with a newer version of Civil 3D. All entities created by Civil 3D within the drawing are in proxy state. Additionally, all commands, settings, and displays of Civil 3D are disabled for this drawing." It does look prettier in the form of image, doesn't it?

Now, what could be newer than Civil 3D 2012 in August of 2011. Nothing really...but see if after the jump.

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

Clever title huh? Not sure how many attendees abide by this, but I can asure you that we will. Both Jason Hickey and myself will be attending and teaching at AU this year in Las Vegas. Please feel free to stop and chat with us, and if you're interested, sign up for one of our classes. I always enjoy meeting our customers and readers face to face. Jason is a seasoned veteran and I am a rookie, but very excited to present this year. Our classes are as follows:

Wednesday, 05 October 2011

This issue seems to be a hot topic lately so I thought I would write a quick post on the subject. Have you been experiencing issues when you try to add new part sizes or make other changes in Part Builder? In most cases this is a permissions related issue, so if you are experiencing this, please read on.

First step is to select the Civil 3D icon, right click, and select PROPERTIES. In the resulting dialog, please select the COMPATIBILITY tab and check the RUN THIS PROGRAM AS ADMINISTRATOR, then click OK. After doing this please try launching Civil 3D again, and see if you are able to make and save the edits. You can also do this directly from the icon's right click menu, but that will apply only to that session of Civil 3D.

Even though you may have full administrative rights on your machine, I have still seen this issue occur, especially on Windows 7 machines. Another place to check would be to ensure that you or your users have full control of the C:\ProgramData folder as this is where the part catalog is located if running a typical install. Hope this helps!